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Tag: Marvel Cinematic Universe

Well, shucks. That was one helluva morning jolt you gave me, man. Stronger than with cheap 3-in-1 coffee. You’re gone, and suddenly my day looked dreary. Le sigh.

But you’re not gonna be gone ‘gone,’ are you? Your legacy will live on long after we’re all dust. If not in movies, cartoons and comic books, surely on the covers of notebooks, on T- shirts, in toy lines. Heck, here in the Philippines, your legacy is even splashed on the sides of public utility jeepneys. You’re everywhere, man.

Like billions of others, I owe you a big THANK YOU. Lots of social media tributes out there, but I’ll borrow Seth Rogen’s: “Thank you Stan Lee for making people who feel different realize they are special.”

Will not beat around the bush: I kinda like Venom. It’s not MCU level, but it’s not crap either like what many critics had led me to believe. It’s dark, it’s violent, it has a pulse-pounding chase scene, and it’s, dare I say, fun. The interaction between Venom and Eddie Brock alone is worth a few chuckles.

However. And this is a big HOWEVER…

I wish the movie had been darker, more violent. It’s Venom, for chrissakes! He eats human heads! That alone should’ve merited an R rating. Whatever happened to that hype that this would be a mature-viewers-only kind of movie? Seems like a bag of lies sold to us gullible losers to get our hopes up. Shame on us for believing.

Actually, the PG 13 rating had set alarm bells ringing in my head. That — and the early reviews I read — made me set my expectations low.

And now there’s talk that about 30 to 40 minutes were cut from the movie and, incidentally, those were Tom Hardy’s “favorite parts” (he reportedly said so in an interview). Well, your guess is as good as mine as to what the hell happened here.

All in all, I did not regret watching Venom on a lazy Sunday afternoon, especially when the alternative was staying at home and dreading Monday. There’s room for a lot of improvement here, and hopefully Sony Pictures will not squander it the next time around.

Call it coincidence: Hours after I weighed the pros and cons of throwing an old lady out of a moving van (couldn’t help it, she was being obnoxious, picking on a toddler who won’t stop crying), I saw Brie Larson punch one in the face. I cheered. And afterward I felt, well, happy.

I was — and still am — happy because the trailer for Captain Marvel has finally dropped, and it was an awesome trailer, up there with Avengers 4: Infinity War, and not because I loathe old people. And it’s not just me; the comments sections are fat with generally positive reviews. Captain Marvel, after all, could be the most anticipated MCU movie since Infinity War — thanks, in part, to that movie’s post-credit scene. You know, the one where Samuel Jackson yelps, “Mother…”

And so the long wait begins. On Facebook, trying to be cute, I wrote, “Can we skip all this Christmas nonsense and go straight to March 2019 already?” It was a joke, of course, as I dig the holidays — the cool weather and the 13th month cash and all that. But still, March 2019, the month Captain Marvel hits the cinemas, can’t come any sooner. Fingers crossed the wait will be worth it.